Making sense of the future

Citation

Yeoman, I.S. (2019), "Making sense of the future", Journal of Tourism Futures, Vol. 5 No. 3, pp. 207-208. https://doi.org/10.1108/JTF-09-2019-093

Making sense of the future

Rise and shine its marijuana time! Says Wright (2019). Across the world attitudes are changing and Cannabis has become a tourism experience, whether it is the Muscle beach in California or the coffee shops of Amsterdam. The paper explores the future potential of a UK cannabis tourism market offering original ideas and exploring a potential future cannabis industry in the UK. The purpose of this paper is to explore a potential strategy in which the UK could integrate cannabis across the country, to encourage tourists to travel to less visited towns and cities. Wright’s takes a sensitive topic and uses the scenario approach to demonstrate what the future could be. This the purpose of future studies for policy makers, decision and the leaders of the tourism industry. As researchers we have a responsibility to make sense of complex issues and uncertainty. Scenario planning is a methodology which brings structure and a framework in to allow sense making (Dervin, 1998).

Scenarios are illustrations of possible future pictures and historically of alternative futures. The key purpose of scenario planning is to change/alter mental models through dialogue, conversation and decision making as a participatory group process thus contributing to learning and an increased capacity to think in innovative and challenging ways (Bradfield, 2008). Scenario planning theory places strong emphasis on revealing and reconstructing mental models. Theorizing is based on the assumption that organisations are systems of feedback loops that spread the dominant mental models and cultural artefacts through interaction (Huff and Jenkins, 2002; Weick and Roberts, 1993; Yeoman and McMahon-Beattie, 2005).

The future is unknown, scary and threatening but at the same time surprising, hopeful and imagination. Global futures face many challenges, whether it is climate change, energy, ageing populations but at the same time the future offers tourism new markets, new tourists and development. Tourism has never been more conscious about its future with changing attitudes towards sustainability. Tourists have been better connected to the world through mobility, advances in technology and in real terms, the falling cost of travel. For thousands of years we failed to understand, predict, control and manage the future of tourism. But today, there has never been a greater desire to understand the future of tourism whether it is the UNWTO 2030 forecasts (UNWTO, 2011) or the OECD Megatrends (OECD, 2018). There has been a movement and realism that the predicting and understanding the future is important, as it is the only form of tourism that we can influence, prepare for and action.

This is what the Journal of Tourism Futures is all about, making sense of the future in order too:

• to inspire the tourism industry and academic community about the future of tourism;

• the dissemination and formulation of the body of knowledge called tourism futures to practitioners, educators, researchers and students;

• to provide an international forum for a wide range of practical, theoretical and applied research within the field of tourism futures;

• to represent a multi-disciplinary set of views on key and emerging issues in tourism futures;

• to include a cross-section of methodologies and viewpoints on research, including quantitative and qualitative approaches, case studies, and empirical and theoretical studies;

• to encourage greater understanding and linkage between the fields of study related to tourism futures; and

• to publish new and original ideas.

Therefore, the scope is:

• To serve and reflect the tremendous growth in research and discussions in tourism futures.

• To take a broad and multi-disciplinary approach to the future, whether it is short term or long term or economics or consumer behaviour. However, the journal will not comprise its position that all papers must be about the “future” and “tourism”.

• To encourage papers that stretch the current boundaries of the fields and develop new areas and new linkages with other relevant areas or combine or introduce new approaches and methodologies.

• To welcome creative and innovative approaches and papers that introduce new concepts and ideas.